Angry Sascha is angry.

The best way to deal with your driving anxiety is choosing the passage over the mountains rather than the tunnel road. People race through tunnels, a passage is far more relaxed and quaint.

Never mind pass roads still are considered highways here in Switzerland. Thus there’s both a lower and upper speed limit, the latter the same as many tunnels’, i.e. 80 km/h. Hey, you’re 68 years old, live in the hilly Canton of Nidwalden, and you have half a century of driving panic under your rather taut belt. Neither serpentine corners – secured by flimsy posts marking the divide between the road and a 300 meters drop – nor irate bus drivers tied to a schedule which doesn’t allow for forty kilometers at 20 mph, nor possibly intoxicated tourists riding their BMW race bikes will make things worse. Will they?

Call it confrontation therapy if you may.

For maximum therapeutic effect, never use one of the abundant sightseeing platforms to swerve off the main road, letting them two dozen irritated drivers behind you pass. It’s passage, not pass, after all.

Also, constant driving speed is overrated, especially on roads where cows might stumble onto your path. The cue of drivers behind you won’t mind to adjust their driving speed by plus/minus 20 km/h to your insecurity and every whim. No, never. What a novel idea.

For Chrissakes.

So this is it. Early adopter, inofficial evangelist, part-time photographer is dropping Lightroom. Rather, deleting it from his workstations.

Who the eff cares? Well, I do, as I am abovementioned former inofficial evangelist. And I wonder what the bloody hell I was thinking. Hindsight is both gift and curse.

What Adobe did with Lightroom, if you stay objective:

• More features. Some direly needed (like, support for your camera?), others more, like, what the hells? Yeah, I’m looking at you, Social Media Upload and Comments Download.
• Selling said features as USPs to justify the hefty price-tag on upgrades. By now I’ve spent more than 400 quid on Lightroom, it’s upgrades, and plug-ins necessary until Adobe deemed stuff like output sharpening important enough for yet another full-price upgrade.
• LR3 is slower and more cumbersome to use than LR2. But it has the better RAW render engine (which you can’t retrofit into LR2), so please upgrade, yes?
• Said RAW render engine is identical to the one used in the current release of Photoshop Elements, which you can get bundled with your next scanner for free.
• Also, depending on the cameras used, the engine is inferior to competitors’ or even open source solutions. In some cases (Leica M series comes to mind), it should be featured in Webster’s, under “What the flying fuck”.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Lightroom concept, I’m pretty happy with most of its results, it’s stable like a rock, and I’m used to the way it works (see above evangelist thing). But bloody hells, Flash galleries? Bug-fixing your RAW rendering engine equals a full-price upgrade? Support for fresh RAW formats one year from now = buy our upgrade? Even though the whole difference is in camera identification in the RAW header?

Lightroom was my favourite as it streamlined workflow issues. But: It’s becoming more and more muddled and complicated to use, while it doesn’t ensure plug-ins won’t crash the whole application just because they are coded poorly. I still find things I wrote off as “well, it’s a new application, you can’t expect that just yet” in 2006 that actually had been there from the beginning – but weren’t obvious or easily accessible. The worst thing for a workflow app is to hide things that might seriously influence or even change the way you look at your current, well, workflow.

It’s just sad. So much potential. Oh, well.

Well, almost four (4) years later, one major publication got wind of font rendering issues in Adobe products. That is, if you want to work with OS X-generated documents using Postscript-flavored OpenType fonts inside Adobe’s world domination scheme aka PDF.

Does this change anything? Probably not. But at least I don’t look like a total crank anymore. Lonely and unloved, boozing too much while getting riled up on things 99.999% of the local populace doesn’t care a flying fuck about. While my customers do. Yours too, probably, otherwise you wouldn’t read this.

You rock, Adobe!

Swiss sports commenter and all-time master of on-air cussing Hans Jucker died today, aged 65. Fuck that.

RIP, dude. Hopefully, there are no chairs in heaven falling on your noggin.

Shite, after 12 years of development and almost 20 years since the original, the Duke seems to be back. For real.

Gearbox, don’t bugger this one up!

Now please excuse me while I daintily remove a tear from me eye. And re-schedule my holiday plans for May.